


Drive

by Go0se



Category: Umbrella Academy
Genre: Ableism, Bad Parenting, Bitterness, Body Horror, Canonical Character Death, Drinking & Talking, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Gen, Gore, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Magic physical recovery, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Other: See Story Notes, Road Trips, Self-Harm, Sisters, deus ex machina in the form of Rumour, like woah
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-02
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-27 22:03:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/666972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Go0se/pseuds/Go0se
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Dallas.  Vanya was sick and crazy and broken. Allison was broken and tired and sick of being alone. So, she weaves a rumour to make her sister not-crazy anymore. They hit the road. Allison doesn't know yet if she'll regret it.</p><p>First stop: clothes, a night's sleep, and the theatre.<br/>Second: coffee for sore throats.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Live Nerves

Allison tries her best to only think about things that are in front of her.

*

She gets back from Vietnam with the others, and Klaus says that everything is exactly the same even though everything's broken. Allison's Luther blasts off to the goddamn fucking moon (or someplace as good as) and leaves her alone. He is crazy and broken. The others-- Klaus, Diego, Five-- are crazy and broken too, in their own individual ways, but she doesn't care about them. They all walk off in different directions, herself included.

Vanya is crazy and broken and helpless as a goddamn infant in a bunker under the mansion's ruins at the edge of the city, and that is where Allison goes.  
The last time Allison had seen her little sister she'd hurt her badly. She isn't sure if, or what, Vanya remembers. She still hesitates at the door for a while, but eventually climbs onto the hospital-issue bed, her arms lightly around her sister like she hadn't done almost ever before then.  
(Hargreaves had never had the time to instill 'his' 'daughters' with such ideas as sisterliness, there was training to do.)  
She lies on her sister's bed in the underground room and listens to the beep and hum and click of the many machines. 

Vanya is the only other girl in her family, other than Mom. It shouldn't matter, but it does. It does matter because Allison and the others just got back from a time-travel trip to fucking Vietnam and Allison, she has blood on her hands again, but Vanya was laying here all on her own the whole time, and Allison had never learned how to relate to her in a way that older sisters should. She had never learned how to relate to anyone the way she should, and she had _tried_. Her best excuse for a role model was a overly-sweet piece of silicone and plastic with a voice modulator and wheels attached to a bustle instead of legs. (How could she have expected to raise Claire, with that being all she knew? Why did she ever think she could do anything?)  
The radiation-level monitor machines make their noises. Her sister stares without seeing at the concrete ceiling; her breath sounds like choked-off sobs she sucks in through her grey-white lips. (Grey-white, but not pale; Vanya's skin isn't human enough to be pale anymore.) Underneath the thin hospital-issue nightgown, unnatural edges are obvious. Thin metal strings, stuck deep in her sister's skin, starting right above her groin and stretching up her torso, piercing again just below her throat. They are a mark of Vanya's sickness, of what's happened to her; to all of them. Even now, with Vanya asleep (but not resting), they will not disappear. 

Allison is tired and sick of being alone. She feels the fabric of reality around her like untold millions of tiny threads, coming in from everywhere and bunching up around her throat. When she breathes, when she opens her mouth to speak, they pull and tauten. 

She pushes herself up on one elbow and then up so she's sitting, criss-crossing her legs and pulling her skirt-- the president's wife's skirt--- down over her knees. Her hand reaches out at first to hold her sister's shoulder, or maybe smooth back her hair, but it's useless. She lets her palm fall to the sterile bedsheet. She swallows once to clear her throat. Her words have always been her power, and the threads around her throat tremble with them. She doesn't understand what makes her lies change the world but she has learned to trust it to understand her, to make what she wants to happen real.  
“I heard a rumour,” she says to her unconscious, daydreaming sister, “That you weren't crazy anymore.”

There is a soft _snap_ in the air. She knows from long practice that no one else would hear it, if there were other people in the bunker to hear.

 

Beside her, Vanya stirs, blinks awake.  
Nothing else changes; her skin doesn't darken to its normal paleness, the bruising around her left eye doesn't disappear, and the strings that indent the thin hospital cotton covering her from collarbone to knee don't fade away. But she rolls her head on her neck toward Allison, her pupils constricting as she focuses; her mouth twists down. “You're going to kill me,” she says. 

And her voice, her voice is filled with resignation and deadened sadness and disgust, her voice is _sane_ , but it's slower than Allison remembers it being. The goddamn drugs, she'd forgotten--- Allison slides to her feet and walks around to the other side of the bed, peels off the hospital tape holding her sister's IV in, then takes the needle itself in between her index and pointer finger and pulls it out of Vanya's arm with only a small tugging of skin. The substance that leaks out of the tiny pinprick is too thick and black to be proper blood; Allison blots it with the sleeve of her coat, and it stops after a few seconds.  
Vanya has rolled her head again so she's looking up at Allison; her eyes clear, finally, although they're no happier. 

Allison clears her throat again. “Let's go for a drive.”

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The additional tags will hit in the second (or maybe third, not sure how exactly I'm going to structure this yet) chapter.  
> I have all intentions of continuing this. Because you know what’s a good story but doesn’t necessarily fix everything? Road trips, that’s what. And it’s my humble opinion that tUA needs a good passing mark on the Bechdell Test anyway.  
> Let it be noted that I first wrote this at 3:54a.m. on a Tuesday morning. Also, let it be known that purple energy drink is mind-bubble-filling delicious.  
> (Constructive reviews are loving reviews.)


	2. Our Neighbourhood's A Wasteland

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... okay, so. I can explain! But really, Gerard hasn't released the third UA yet, so who's later? Not me. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. *jazzhands*
> 
>  _The warnings for this chapter are_ : self-harm and gore, both of which are described heavily. The heaviest scene is right after Allison wakes up in the hotel. The body horror also kicks into gear here. Please take care of yourselves if needed.  
> Also added: implied/reference sexual assault. It's past-tense and offscreen; I'm referencing what happened to Vanya right before she got turned into the White Violin. There's no assault that takes place during this story.
> 
> It's been... a long, weird time that's passed when I've been writing this fic (on and off). I reserve the right to rewrite this including the first chapter. But in the meantime, I hope you enjoy it. 
> 
> ~~~

  
At first the only important thing is getting out.

Finding a car is easy. Getting the driver to hand the keys over to them, along with most of the cash the driver had on hand, is easier still. 

Allison's clothing that she had in the bunker is stuffed into a compact black bag which sits on the passenger seat. She drives with terrible posture and tight hands. She can see her sister's face in the rear-view.  
Vanya didn't have any of her own clothes in the recovery room-slash-quarantine she’d been kept in. She sits alone in the backseat, leaning against the window, wrapped in one of Klaus' old long jackets which in turn is wrapped over her hospital gown. She keeps her arms close to her sides and her knees pressed sharply together, her bare feet bent obtusely at her ankles so only the ends of her toes touch the strange car's carpet. She stares out at the road. Her eyes are tired, but not empty.

Back in the bunker it’d taken Vanya a couple of minutes to understand that Allison had been serious, that they were really leaving. She’d sat up sluggishly, only moving with the help of the bars around her hospital bed. Trembling, she’d swung her legs over the side of the bed. She’d put her feet on the cold floor with caution. She’d taken her first step in months, and then a few more.

The car’s radio is all static. Allison flicks it off with a sharp movement of her wrist, like breaking a neck.

   
When they get inside the city limits it’s mid-afternoon. Allison unrolls the window to have a cigarette and a brief gust of wind whistles through the car. In the rear-view mirror, Vanya’s reflection shakes.

Allison pauses.

Right. Weather’s been cold out, even for summer. She doesn't know if Vanya's actually cold-- if her sister can _get_ cold anymore-- but she’s almost definitely uncomfortable. If they’re going to go anywhere at all Vanya is going to need actual clothes.

 

With that in mind, Allison drives them to a small chain thrift store that's part of a strip mall in the east quarter of the city. The whole parking lot is empty except for them and litter and seagulls. Despite the chill in the air, the pavement's boiling. There’s no breeze.

She parks haphazardly, pulls out the keys. She turns in her seat to see over her shoulder. “Come on, we’re going in,” she says.  
Vanya startles at the noise, looking around with wide eyes that narrow suspiciously when she realizes where they are. She doesn’t reply.  
“You don't have to worry about money,” Allison tells her. Annoyed when she doesn’t move, she reaches over to push Vanya's shoulder.

Vanya flinches away. She leans her weight into the car door and opens it, stumbling out in bare feet.   
Allison sighs, but opens her own door and follows her sister inside.

  
The store is just as deserted as the parking lot. Vanya freezes for a second just inside the doors, and then walks fast, arms wrapped around herself in a gesture that's one park anxious modesty and two parts self-preservation. She moves in jagged lines from rack to rack, grabbing clothing in clumsy armfuls.

Allison hangs back on the sidewalk outside, finishing her smoke. She watches Vanya through the huge storefront windows. Her cigarette burns out just as Vanya veers to the back of the store, where the changing rooms are, so Allison pushes herself off of the wall and goes in.

The gap between the changing stalls’ door and the smudged linoleum flooring exposes Vanya’s legs to the middle of her shins. They look even more skeletal in the fluorescent lighting, cut off from context.   
Allison rubs at her prosthetic absently. For a minute she stays near the stalls, arms crossed over her chest.  Then she shrugs. She walks over to the little kids section and starts picking through the little dresses, ignoring the ones that have three or more holes for arms.  
It seems like her sister takes a long time to get dressed, but Allison doesn't care. It's not like they have anywhere they need to be.

  
Eventually Allison hears the squeaks of rubber soles on linoleum coming up behind her. She looks up to see Vanya striding toward her, covered head to toe in thick clothing. Between the low brim of a knitted hat and the top of a knotted scarf, her eyes are wide, and it seems like the bruise is darkening. But that could just be the light.       
Vanya stops farther than an arms’ length away from Allison. She hides her hands in the pockets of the knee-length coat she'd grabbed. (Klaus’ old trench was folded over her arm.) She doesn’t speak, just waits.

It's time for them to go. “Come on,” Allison says, and starts to walk quickly up the aisle.

Vanya follows her. She pauses as they come up near the check-out, but Allison shakes her head. “Leave them to me.”  
Her sister hesitates, then brushes past her.  
  
There are two cashiers on duty, a teenager and an old woman. They were standing together and chatting by the Lane 1 checkout when Allison and Vanya had came in. Both of them look up, at first confused, when Vanya walks right past them and out of the door with her clothes. Alarms jangle to life behind her. She hadn’t taken any of the tags off.  
Allison rubs her forehead, then clears her throat. Again.  
“Hey!” The younger cashier starts, stepping out from behind the checkout. “You can’t--”  
“I heard a rumour you both drink on the job,” Allison says loudly.  The cashiers' attention immediately snaps to her.  Even as they do she can hear the soft snaps, feel reality fracturing. “I heard that you've drunk so much today you won't remember anything about your shifts tomorrow.”   
The teenager stumbles in the middle of their step, falling out of sight behind the counter with a muffled thump.  The old woman catches herself on the edge of the cash register and hangs onto it like she's in a storm, swaying back and forth and mumbling under her breath.  
  
Neither of them even look up as Allison moves past them.

  
There's a watercolour painting of the night sky sitting in a cheap frame on the wall by the door.  Allison grabs it on her way out. The little bell tinkles brightly behind her as the door slams shut.  
  
  
*

  
They drive out of the cracked parking lot and onto the cracked road, heading deeper into the city.

 

Allison doesn't pay close enough attention to know where, exactly.  She's been driving for enough years that it's mostly automatic. She doesn't worry where they're going.  
The important part is that she manages not to run them off the road or into any others cars-- of which there aren't many. Most of the smart people left the city ages ago. When everything was blowing up.  
Vanya is quiet in the backseat. When Allison looks back at her sister, Vanya has her eyes open and is staring blankly at the outside.  Some of the offices, apartment towers and box stores they pass are still pockmarked with evidence of disaster, the owners either too cash-strapped or too dead to have fixed them up, even in all this time. 

Allison wonders if her sister remembers bringing all that destruction down. Did Allison give her that back, too, along with enough other memories to make Vanya recognize her adopted sister, and realize that she had meant Vanya harm?  

 

When it starts getting dark, Allison navigates them to a small hotel on the edge of one of the better neighbourhoods. It was where she had exiled herself to whenever things were particularly painful with Patrick and she hadn't wanted to stay angry in the house because it would make Claire upset. (Because she might say something, something awful. It was safer away.) But it hurt to think about her daughter, so she doesn't, not really. She just remembers the cheap rates for a night and the need to crash somewhere, and maybe eat.  
  
The moon's half-waxed and bright in the smoggy sky as Allison gets out of the car, her sleek black carry-all bag over her shoulder. Seconds after she slammed the car door and started walking up toward the front lobby, she heard the slam of a second car door from right behind her; though no footsteps followed her up the pavement. Allison decided she didn't care. If Vanya wanted to follow her, she would.

The receptionist of the hotel looks up when Allison comes in the doors and spends about five seconds staring her down. After apparently deciding that Allison wasn't a threat, a drunk, or a teenager, she's not terribly interested in anything Allison has to say, and hands over the key to a room on the ground floor without looking up from the portable TV she had set up in the corner of her desk. She does looks sort of amused at the cash that Allison hands her, though, as if it's ridiculous to carry physical money around. “The continental breakfast closes at eleven. Enjoy your stay,” she says.  
As Allison's writing her name on the input sheet (not a lie, because she didn't know whether or not her lie would manifest in an actual person with the name she gave), she hears the front door open behind her and the quick thuds of her sister's new shoes going directly into the hall that housed all of the rooms.   
  
When she gets down there herself Vanya is huddled against the wall, face bent against one of her many new scarfs. Standing like that, her bruised left eye hidden, Vanya can almost be imagined to be a normal woman who hadn't killed thousands. Almost. Her white neck (not pale, but _white_ ) gives her away.

The room's handle clicks open witb a swipe of the keycard. Both sisters step into the room, neither looking at each other or saying a word.

  


Allison wakes up a primordial thing.  
She can tell it's the same night because the room around her, invisible in the dark, smells the same. Cigarettes, stale and not, on top of the lingering smell of cleaning agents, and a dash of formaldehyde. Allison's eyes are lidless and her legs and arms heavy, weighted down by exhaustion that feels like caked-on mud. Her thoughts are sluggish, images of fire and warmth, and the smell of death carried on smoke. She stares up at the ceiling but doesn't see it through the gloom. _In the beginning there was the dark._  
From somewhere to her left comes a strange noise. A rasp. Allison's ancient brain latches onto it, turning her stiff neck toward the sound.  
There's a thin line of light, like a crack in something shining, a few feet from her.  Her eyes contract slightly and suddenly there's a planes attached to the light; revealing curled grey beige, like fur. It takes a couple seconds for her to parse the images together; the hotel's carpet, the bathroom door. The bathroom's light is on.  
The noise comes again, clearer: thick gurgling mess, and this time it's distinct as a  _cry_. It's a child's sound.

A different part of Allison's brain wakes up then, and she's rolling out of bed and feeling her ancient feet land on the carpet without really really registering it, thinking of her baby throwing up, small face distressed and shaking, holding onto her belly with both hands. Allison limps to the bathroom door and pushes it open; light spills into the darkened hotel room like blood from a cut. “Claire--?”  
The word catches itself in Allison throat as she chokes, slamming her hand over her mouth.

 

Vanya is standing in the narrow bathroom covered in _carnage._ Standing is too generous a word: she's bent over herself like her spine's caved in, her back slumped against the sink and one of her feet braced against the base of the tub. She's stripped off her clothes to only a thin tank top and underwear, both stark white, almost invisible against her skin except for the thick black ooze that's spilling onto them. Her tank top is ridden up around the bottom of her ribs. Allison can see two large, curling marks imprinted right over where her sister's ovaries would be, dug into the skin like old scars or new burns, and between them there are _strings_ , taut and gristley in the harsh fluroescent light. They strain up from her abdomen, disappear under her sister's tank top and re-appear again at the base of her bare neck, stabbing seamlessly into the skin again just above her clavicle.   
Vanya's right hand is curled around a knife, a short black-handled knife like Diego always threw, and Allison understands. Vanya is trying to gouge the strings out of her throat.

But they won't come loose. Thick black liquid that isn't blood oozes from them where the knife has sawed, and the skin where they're attached to Vanya's neck looks strained and bruised, but they stay embedded.  Allison notices thick slashes on the lower part of Vanya's torso oozing the same not-blood, even more grotesque on all the terrible death-white of her skin; other patches seeping through the thin tank top higher up on her body.  
Vanya yanks with her left hand at the four strings level with her collarbone, and they _pull,_ stretching the skin at her neck and tenting her tank top as they lift away, but it's impossible, because they stay. A part of her. She makes the sound again, the one that woke Allison up, but this time it's a feral noise of an animal panicking and in pain. She pulls on the strings but the strings are attached to her skin or _are_ her skin, now. Nothing she tries will work. She's crying, and Allison can't tell if her sister's tears are transfigured too, slate white, or if it's just the water reflecting her unnatural statue skin.  
  
Allison had seen her sister once before after she'd been… transformed, or whatever had happened, after she'd went crazy; but then she herself had been tired and panicked, and—  she lifted her hand to her own throat, feeling the ropy softness of the scar. Vanya had been crazy and all the damage to her body had been shown, stark against the fire and smoke, but in the madness of the fight it'd looked nothing like this. _Nothing_ like this. Allison had no idea how much her sister had _changed._  
But even with strings in her neck, somehow her sister still breathes. Allison doesn't believe in miracles but she knows a lot about killing people. It's dumb luck that her sister's windpipe hasn't been hit by the way she's sawing at herself. Allison steps forward finally, she reaches out with both hands and takes their brother's knife from Vanya before the other woman can hurt herself more.  
Vanya's foot slips off of the edge of the tub and she crumples to the floor in a graceless mess.  Her right hand is still curved around the shape of the knife handle in the air, while her left is pressed around her throat. Allison doesn't know if she's trying to stop the bleeding or choke herself but either way she pulls Vanya's hand away.  At first she means to lock their fingers together comfortingly, or even just squeeze to remind her sister that she's here and not somewhere else-- something she'd used to do with Luther, once, something Patrick had helped her with, they'd both-- but it's useless. She lets Vanya's hand fall back into her lap.  
Like that was a signal Vanya curls over herself, pressing her forehead hard against her knees and making that strangled, keening noise again. From this angle the thick scar on her skull is obvious and stark against her skin.  
  
Allison remembers the bullet that made it. She sees all the people dying, remembers her Luther wasting himself in front of faceless celebrities on the TV in the basement-- remembers the hospital. Vanya's fault, Vanya's fault, Vanya's fault.  
She hadn't healed Vanya completely when she'd given her sister her mind back. She doesn't think she would. Not really. Looking at this—the extent her sister’s power had—Allison isn’t even sure that she _could._  
The knife is heavier than it looks and sticky with the tar that's still spilling out of Vanya's wounds. Allison lets it clunk to the floor, disgusted and in shock. “Where did you even get this,” she hears herself saying, but already she can see it in her mind: Vanya stumbling around the bunker, walking for the first time in months, instinctively grabbing for something to cover herself. The corkboard part of the wall that Kraken had used as target practice, right above where Luther's head would be when he sat on the couch to watch TV, still covered with knives even in Kraken’s long absence that hadn’t really been an absence at all because _fucking time travel_. Vanya pulling a blade out without thinking, just to prove to herself she could, that her fingers moved again. Klaus' coats always had deep pockets, the easier to hide things in.  
“Why would you do this,” Allison says, but she can answer that herself too.

  
Vanya's her only sister and it should _matter_ but Allison only puts her hand on her own scar again and sits there, on the bathroom floor, wondering if she should get first aid kit, wondering if they should talk, not moving. Vanya is still broken and maybe a different kind of crazy, and Allison is tired.

 

*

 

They don't talk about it.  
  
Instead, the next morning, coffee and plates of toast and little bunches of anemic grapes are set up at a small buffet table in the near-empty diner attached to the hotel. A radio talk show filters through the wall that separates the kitchen from the dining space. Sunlight strains in the tall windows facing the parking lot.  
The scabby-cheeked waitress is getting herself a soda behind the main counter. She looks up and gives a cursory nod toward Allison and Vanya as they walk in.    
Vanya flinches, either from the light or the acknowledgment, and then her expression turns embarrassed. She nervously pulls her scarf tighter.

Allison waits until her sister moves out of the doorway to start forward herself. The two of them pick a table by the exit. They sit down in the torn-cushioned chairs like it's the morning after an earthquake, broken jagged glass on the ground all around their feet and the quiet too loud.

  
At some point in the night Vanya's sobbing had dwindled to the tiny hiccuping yelps of an animal with its paw caught in a trap. Allison, moving for the first time since she’d sat on the floor, had pulled one of the fluffy grey towels out of the cupboard under the bathroom sink, and put it over her sister's shoulders. Vanya hadn't moved her head from her knees but had timidly held onto the corner, so she was at least still conscious.  
Then Allison had got up and went back to bed.

When she'd woken up again the cheap neon clock set on the hotel's nightstand told her it was nine-thirty. Vanya had been on the other bed, fully dressed, staring at the slightly open bathroom door.  
The vacancy of her eyes reminded Allison too much of the amnesia and the hospital so she'd said her sister's name, abruptly, without even fully meaning too. Vanya had looked over, to Allison’s relief, her eyes still tired and haunted. Still sane.

 

Now her sister's blue eyes were looking out the window at the parking lot. Her hand that wasn't clenched like a death-claw around her coffee mug kept straying upward to press against the side of her head, where her gauged hair and the scar on her skull were hidden artlessly under a dark knit-hat that she'd pulled down over her ears. Her mouth kept pinching even as she was drinking her coffee. It didn’t look like an intentional move.  
Allison made her toast into a sandwich with two of the peanut butter and jam packets that were sitting next to their plates, and ate a few of the bunched grapes. They tasted rubbery and sour. She watched Vanya not eat any of her food and wondered, without really caring, whether or not Vanya was even capable of eating anymore. Probably, since she was drinking her coffee.  But coffee was different.

 

After they had both finished their meagre breakfasts, they cleared out their room. Vanya stood back in the hallway when Allison checked them out, handing the keycard back to the same indifferent clerk that had signed them in the night before.  
Allison thinks, though she maybe be wrong, that the woman looks at her a little differently. She wonders if the woman had heard Vanya crying last night. She smiles a little in the hopes that that would help shift the blame.

  
  
  
Out in the parking lot the city swells into reality again. A column of heavy smoke, like a beacon, rises into the sky from somewhere to the west. A couple sirens screech their way down the street.   
Some teenagers are making out in a van. The music they have cranked pours out the cracked windows and mingles with the sirens, along with their groans. Allison considers tapping on the window and telling them to use protection, but decides against it. They either will or they won't. She averts their eyes to give them as much privacy as she can while their loud proclamations of love are filtering through the glass, scanning the rows of cars for the one she’d stolen.  
Vanya, she notices, is staring at the column of smoke in the far sky. 

When she finds the vehicle and gets in, Vanya stations herself in the backseat wordlessly. They click their seatbelts and Allison puts the thing into reverse, checking her shoulder to make sure she doesn't run over any sleeping homeless people.  
In a matter of minutes they're on the street again.

It's hot in the car, the sun having soaked into the black paint and the deep-grey seats. Allison swipes her hair out of her eyes and it sticks to her forehead. The only sound is the hum of the tires on the pavement and ambient noise from the city, slightly muffled by glass and plastic.

 

“Where are we going?” Vanya asks suddenly, looking up at Allison. She catches her eye in the rearview. “Do you have a place you’re trying to go?”  
It's the most she's spoken to Allison in about thirteen years.  
Allison doesn't answer for a minute, trying to keep them from crashing and process her sister's words at the same time. “Not for now,” she says finally.  
  
Vanya nods.  Her hands are wringing themselves in her lap, twisting like her wrists are hurting. “Can we stop at the Icarus theatre? It's downtown.” Vanya swallows. “I need something from there.”

 

Allison thinks of saying 'no'. She thinks of it hard.   
She knew where the theatre was, and what it was. The place where her sister had almost brought the moon down on the whole planet. The part of Allison that'd been raised by a paranoid alien jackass perked up, asking questions like, _what if she wants to finish the job?_ But Allison remembers what the doctor said, what she had overheard from Luther when he'd come into the hospital after her own throat surgery, and how much her sister’s hands were shaking at breakfast that day. Vanya would never play the violin again. She couldn’t even hold a coffee mug, let alone a bow, or even a gun. Vanya's essentially helpless now. What in God's name would she find in that theatre, fond memories?  
Allison's mouth twists bitter laugh that doesn't make it past her throat. “Fine. We'll swing by.” 

Vanya doesn't thank her.

 

 

The theatre is just as decrepit outside as it was months ago.

Inside, it’s just as huge and forbidding, now with even more dust.  The sound and sunlight of the city spills in through the broken section of wall that Kraken had been thrown through. Allison remembers a lie, a long time ago-- _the lighting rig in this place was a rush job; any kind of weight and it'll give._ She glances up at the metal catwalk suspended over the stage, keeping her mouth carefully shut.  
Beside her, Vanya is shaking.   
When Allison stops walking just inside the left wing entrance to the old, rickety stage, Vanya takes a couple more steps and jerks to a stop too. She turns around and her eyes are wide.  Her voice wobbles scarily towards the juvenile, confused tone it'd had when she was still strapped into the hospital bed. “You won't come with me?”  
“No.” It flies out of her mouth before Allison can think better of it. But then it's out there, and she can't take it back.  The reality threads around her neck tighten, trying to make a lie push itself up and out, but she keeps her teeth pressed hard together. She can feel her heartbeat loud in her throat.  
Vanya hesitates, visibly wavering. She's breathing too fast and her eyes are wide and terrified.  
Allison feels something twinge in her chest at the sight, but she makes herself look away, up at the metal light rigging again. She doesn't know _why_ she refused, only that whatever her sister wants from this place can't be any good and Allison is done being a part of it. She's gotten the woman this far. It should be enough.

In front of her, her sister takes hesitant steps. Eventually she manages an uneven walk to the front of the displated stage.  
There's a set there that's been leftover from some opera, or something: an ancient gramophone as big as a person that’s attached to some kind of machine, which is in turn attached to a hospital bed with thick straps hanging off of its sides, the kind used to hold people down. Allison doesn't remember seeing the contraption when she'd been here last, but then, she'd had other things to worry about at the time. Reflexively she reaches up and touches her throat.  
Her sister walks to the side of the bed facing the audience and then crouches down. She's visibly trembling now. It's strange to remember that she’d almost caused the apocalypse from this very place, maybe from that exact spot. Something rustled softly in the wide room.  
After a few seconds Vanya jerks upright with something small clutched in her hands and then runs, actually _runs,_ away from the strange setting and past Allison, out into the street again. She lets the metal stage door slam shut behind her in her haste.

 

Allison watches her go, then turns back to the setpieces with a frown.

Curiosity pushes her to the front of the stage. On the floor is a bundle of clothing, as filled with dust as the rest of the place, looking like they'd been cast there carelessly. There's a long pleated skirt, a coat with large buttons and wide pockets, a striped pale shirt, a couple of long socks, and-- Allison takes a step back, feeling her stomach turn--- a plain white bra and a pair of beige underwear. The last two items were crumpled and stuck almost underneath the gurney, like they'd been removed last and then kicked out of the way. A couple of black kitten-heeled shoes lay abandoned beside them.  
Allison remembers the marks carved into Vanya's stomach and side. She remembers the carnival, back when all this had started, the flames and lasers firing everywhere and her head sick with the remembered smell of Dr. Terminal's rotting breath. She'd seen Diego dive forward to protect someone, knocking them into the ground and saving them from being blown to bits by a missile. It had been a woman, she was sure-- a woman with short hair, and hadn't her jacket been the same as this one? She'd thought, in the middle of the bedlam, that it had been her sister...   
She shuts down that train of thought with as much force as she can. Turning on her heel, she scrubs her eyes once and then followed Vanya out of the building, almost as fast. She needs to get them both in the car and get the fuck away from this place.

 

The sun beats down on the parking lot and Allison can practically feel her shoes melting from the soles up. She clenches the stolen keys in her real hand as she finds their--her-- car. She gets all the way through opening the door and sliding into the driver's seat before she realizes what's wrong.    
Vanya's not inside.

Allison heart kicks up into doubletime. She scrambles back out and looks everywhere, until she notices a small pharmacy with bars over the grimy windows just across the street.  Allison can just make out someone in a black hat standing in the waiting line in front of the counter, hunched over slightly and hugging themselves.  
She exhales. She leans against the driver-side door, deciding to wait.  
  
Her sister walks out of the pharmacy a couple minutes later, blinking in the bright sun and then over at the car.  
Allison raises her hand, not really a wave, just a signal, out of instinct; _I'm here._  
Vanya looks at right at her, seems to hesitate, then nods and starts across the street. As she gets closer Allison can see the outline of a dozen or so small bottles against the thin shopping bag that hung off Vanya's arm.   
“I could have gotten those for you,” Allison tells her sister when Vanya's about two feet away. Her bruised eye looks even stranger in sunlight. And her skin-- not translucently pale but _white._ Like solid rock, nothing human. Allison couldn't stop staring at it.  
Vanya stops walking, again out of arm's reach, and tries to look directly at her. It takes her a couple seconds. “... would you have?” She manages to ask Allison, finally. “Gotten me anything?”  
Allison presses her lips together, silent again. She shakes out her pockets for the keys. 

 

*

 

Allison makes for a chain coffee store she knows has a drive-through.  
A young East Indian woman passes her a steaming cup through the drivers window. Allison smiles benignly at her and hands over a couple of bills in return. The bills are one of the last few they have in the car, but she can fix that later.  
Allison lets the car idle in the coffee place's lot and smokes for a while, leaning her elbow on the open driver’s-side window. She listens to Vanya shuffle around in the backseat.  
It turns out that the small bottles were makeup. In the rearview Allison can see Vanya smear foundation over her cheeks and nose with a sterile cotton puff, painting it over her pointed chin. Vanya takes out a black pencil and, gingerly, starts tracing it over her eyebrows by feel. It's a bit of a mess because her hands shake, but after three tries she gets them mostly filled out. Shell pink lipstick covers up the bland whiteness of her mouth. Her complexion is uneven, maybe, but any makeup-wearer does that. Vanya pulls the ends of her sleeves down and her scarf up, and then seems to relax, just for a minute.  
She looks almost normal. Like she used to be.  
It's enough that Allison gets angry for a second-- the things that her sister had done, she _should_ have to remember them, like Allison has to. Like the whole city, the whole  _world_ has to.  
But then Vanya reaches up to her neck and presses the tips of her fingers against her scarf, where the hollows of her throat would be, and pulls her hand like she'd been burned. 

Allison turns her eyes back toward the low hedges that separate the coffee place's parking lot from the street. When the smell of nail polish oozes through the car, and Vanya starts cursing continuously in a thick voice, she rolls down a window.

 

 

//


	3. These Unforgiving Days

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi and here we are again! Chapter title from "Ocean's End", by The Trews.  
> Warnings for this chapter: "the pairings are the warnings" aka implied/referenced adopted sibling incest, and the consent issues involved with reality-warping superpowers; lots of murder; implied/referenced past sexual assault (situation when Allison was kidnapped by Dr. Terminal); divorce; off-screen minor character death. Also littering. 
> 
> ///

Time passes strangely when you have no plans and nothing to do except survive. There are more nights and more nightmares. More daylight and more coffee.

 

Allison charges her credit cards. She keeps pace with the ghost of herself she sees on the side of the road, in this nested loop she'd caught them in. She thinks about skipping town or even hopping states, just getting on the highway and driving until they run out of gas completely, and then lying about how the old owner of the car always kept a spare jerry can in the trunk, so they could drive until they were out of gas again.

But instead she finds herself circling through familiar places, the same compulsive way someone would press on their wound to see if it still hurts.  The ice cream stand; the mansion; the hospital; the ashy carnival site... the hospital, the mansion, the ice cream stand.

 

She thinks of the ones she loves. She knows that Claire is still in the city somewhere. Her precious little girl will be staying with Patrick, and the new girlfriend he's hung on his arm. Allison knows she shouldn't care about her ex-husband's love life, but she does anyway. She can't stop caring about it.  
She has no idea where Luther is. Maybe he’s on the moon again; or maybe knee-deep in a conflict somewhere dark, surrounded by a language neither he or Allison speaks. She isn't sure which option makes her more upset, deep in her chest like a heart attack.  

This whole thing would be a lot easier if she could drink through it. Unfortunately Allison doesn't have an active deathwish, and you need to be at least kind of sober to drive a car.

Technically, Allison supposes, she’s on the wagon now. Go her.

 

  
Vanya moves up to the front passenger seat, but doesn't show any kind of increased trust in Allison or talk about why she did it. She doesn't talk much at all. Not even to complain about how they never arrive anywhere. She just looks away whenever they pass the Icarus theatre, and watches the other scenery with faraway eyes. Sometimes, as if she doesn't realize she's doing it, she picks at invisible guitar strings on her lap.  The real strings on her throat stay hidden under scarves and button coats and shirts with necks too high for the weather.    
The only thing she reacts to other than direct questions is something breaking the quiet. When Allison tries to turn on the car radio, she flinches.

Allison likes music better than hearing her own thoughts, but she understands aversion to noises and doesn’t particularly want to share a car with someone who startles at every sound. She leaves the radio off.

 

Time passes.

 

*

 

  
One day Vanya does something weird for their family: she volunteers information.

 

Later, Allison will have no idea what started it. They're circling through a multi-level clover loop in the highway that feeds the north end of Main Street back into itself and she’s been chain-smoking, focusing on the nicotine in her lungs instead of the fact that Luther had left her and didn't seem to be coming back and everyone she loved or tried to love was gone or dead and her baby probably wouldn’t remember her in a few years and she’d failed at being a mother and a partner and a sibling and a human. She’s on her fifth cigarette. It’s going well.

Vanya is staring out the window, curling and uncurling her fingers as much as she can (which isn’t much). Without any warning she says, “I can't see right anymore.”  
  
Allison looks over, then back at the road as they curve around yet another level. “What?”  
  
“I can't see right anymore,” Vanya repeats. “Since the... since _he_ ,” her face curls into a sneer at the window, like she hates even saying the word, “Put me into the murder machine, and since I woke up, I can't. It's like what you see in movies where they put a red filter on everything, only, I can't blink it off. It won't go away.”  
Allison says nothing.   
“It was like anesthesia,” Vanya continues. “Except it fucking hurt. I mean, I couldn’t move, and the needles-- and the music, everything was music, I _saw_ in jagged--fucking--music notes. Like a bad trip.” Vanya looks down at her clenching and unclenching hands as if she just realized what she was doing. She couldn’t actually curl all her fingers into a fist. They hooked instead, like claws without pointed ends. “But I could feel it,"  she says, and swallowed. "In my fingers and wrists. All that power.  I was so cold, and the music hurt, but I could have broken the world apart.”

 _You did break the world,_ Allison thinks, but doesn’t say a word. _You did. And now you don't even remember, but I have to remember everything--_ Her fingers tighten on the wheel.

Vanya nods to herself, still looking at her hands, and then she reaches into the center aisle and pulls up the case of soda that the two of them had bought on a whim a couple days ago. She cracks one open clumsily, tips her head back and drinks for a long time. She holds the can in two hands, using her lower hand like a stabilizing post. Her ever-present scarf still can't disguise the ridges on her skin. They move when she swallows.  
Allison remembers black ooze and feels sick.

“Do you always feel like that?” Vanya’s looking at Allison.  She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and some of her makeup smears off, leaving a slash of unnatural white against the normal-pale and normal-dark of the rest of her face. Her bright eyes are alarming. “The cold?”

  
Allison swerves off to the shoulder of the highway and hits the brakes.  They ease into a stop, puffing up dust underneath them.  Vanya looks without moving while Allison turns in her seat to look her sister in the eye.  
 “What do you remember?” Allison asks, sharply. “Tell me that. From when you were batshit, what do you remember?”    
She watches as the question sinks into Vanya's head and the other woman's shoulders tense up. 

Eventually, when Vanya says nothing, Allison turns back to the wheel and flips her turn signal on, merging back into traffic. Her hands are shaking. 

 

“Why did you even wake me up?” Vanya says it more than asks it, bitterly.

Allison keeps her eyes ahead of her. She's good at recognizing when someone has layers to their words, more than one question. Fuck if Allison's knows any of the answers.

At the same time, no lie she could say would make more sense than the truth. “Because I wanted you with me,” she replies.

And Vanya has nothing to say to that.

  

*

 

  
It becomes kind of a pattern. Vanya talks, sometimes asks questions; Allison responds or doesn't.  
  
  
During a sluggish afternoon, sitting outside one of the fanciest hotels in the city, Vanya says,  “Do you ever wonder why Mom named us what she did?”  


On a whim Allison had parked them in a VIP spot and went into the hotel a half hour or so before. She'd heard a rumour that drinks were free for people with purple hair, and had came out back out with two lattes from the hotel's chrome-topped bar.  She knew Vanya's order—lack of one, really--well enough by now that she hadn't asked her sister what she'd wanted, just tapped the window when she got back to the car and then got back in, passing the cup over.

 

Now Allison takes a deep sip of her own drink, staring forward as the third limo in an hour pulled up to the front doors of the tall building. There were so many rich people in this city. It’s strange that she'd grown up as one of them.  
“Not really,” she answers when she’s done drinking.  
  
“Diego and I used to talk about it.” Vanya blots her lips with a napkin, stares at the shell-pink residue on the tissue paper and then crumples it against her leg. “Whenever he and I were wondering where we really came from. We, uh, we did that sometimes. When we were kids.”  
  
Allison runs her finger around the smooth ceramic edge of the coffee cup's lid. She could say a lot of things about what Vanya and Diego had done sometimes when they were younger. “I never really thought about it."  
“It was like, we didn't really belong there, so maybe we belonged with our original parents, you know? Klaus talked about it sometimes, too. He had, like, theories. But we thought maybe Mom picked the names out based on where we'd come from when we were babies. Maybe Diego had been from Mexico or somewhere. I might have been from Greece,” Vanya adds. “There was a holobook of baby names from all over the place that we found in the library once. Mine was listed as Greek.”  
“Library?’  
“Yeah.”  
“I thought you two were all about getting the shit beaten out of each other in a crowd of other people trying to beat the shit out of each other.” Allison had never listened to the Prime-8s, but she vaguely remembered Kraken being late for drills a lot, and then the vinyl album cover that Ben had dug out of the trash compactor one time. That trainwreck of a band her sister and Kraken had set up had been their whole, late teenage  _lives_.

She doesn’t mean it maliciously, but Vanya goes quiet for too long. When Allison looks over it’s to see Vanya's fingers tight enough on the fancy glass take-out cup that it’d worry Allison if it was someone's throat.  
Vanya expression is like she wants to smile or kill someone. “Not always,” she answers finally. “Sometimes we went to the library.”  
“... I did too, once,” Allison offers. “It didn't really turn out so good.”  
“Yeah,” Vanya replies. “He told me about that one.”  She sets down her cup and picks at her nails. It’s like picking at bulletproof glass.

  
Both of them pay close attention to the silence for a while.

  
“It doesn't really make sense, anyway,” Allison says.  “I named Claire because of what it meant, not because she was born somewhere French or Latin.”  
“You have a daughter?” Vanya looks over at her, blue eyes wide.  
Allison closes her eyes and rubs her forehead. “You sound like Space. He said the same thing.” A sharp pain in her heart, right under her breastbone.  
“How old is she?” Vanya asks uncertainly.  
“Five. She'll be six in two weeks.” Allison remembers the very first time she’d held Claire in the hospital. She hated hospitals, but it’d been necessary, and thanks to herself it'd been quick. She’d told the kind-eyed nurse that it was fine, short labours ran in her family-- and then less than three hours later her healthy newborn daughter had been in her arms.  
“Oh.” Vanya stares at the hotel in front of them. “Who's taking care of her?”  
“Patrick," Allison replies. "My ex-husband. He has custody, I see her on weekends and some holidays." It was awful to say it, but it was better this way. She'd been having a harder time since Claire had grown-- she could tell a baby not to play with her food or go near the electric sockets, and everything would be okay, but what could she do when Claire started asking questions she didn't have answers for? How could she explain where Claire's aunts and uncles were, or why she'd never take her daughter to fairs?   
  
Allison coughs, shaking herself out of her thoughts. "I hadn't been living at that old bunker for my fucking health, y’know.”  
Vanya laughs humourlessly. “No, I guess not.” She tips her coffee up, drinking in long swallows, and then holds the cup in her lap like it’s a precious thing.  “When did you get married?”  
“Eight years ago.” Vanya doesn’t respond, so she adds, “We bought a house together. Not a mansion. A good one.”  The rooms had been clean and airy but still small enough you could putter around in them, which was why Allison had preferred it over the other houses they'd looked at. It had seemed like such a _normal_ place to live.  “There was a fence around the front yard and everything.”  
  
“Yeah?” Vanya's voice twists. “Did you pay neighbourhood boys to paint it white on a sunny day while your golden retriever ran around?”  
  
Allison lets the silence sit for a second. “We painted it ourselves. Yellow. We had an indoor cat and two guinea pigs.  Patrick’s allergic to dogs.”  
  
“Oh.” The fight goes out of Vanya as soon as it had come and she visibly deflates, hunching her shoulders over her lap.  
 

After a couple seconds quiet, Vanya asks, “So why did you leave him?”  
Internally, Allison flinches. Outwardly she exhales, not letting her hands clench.

There was no way Vanya knew how much those particular words had bothered her for so long, how many people had demanded them of her.  
She'd left because she'd kept trying to be normal but she kept slipping, and her life seemed to be building itself around her rather than the other way around. Because she didn’t fit. Because she thought about Luther too much when she should have been paying attention to her real husband. Because Patrick’s cleaning habits drove her insane. Because the all-encompassing anxiety that’d taken root when Claire had started to be old enough to be a _person_ instead of a loud and messy sort of doll that Allison could take care of, had finally gotten the best of her. Because she had no idea how to raise a child without having every nice thing in their lives be compensation for something horrible. Because Allison loved her daughter, and since giving birth she’d been terrified of anything happening to her, and as Claire got older Allison was growing terrified the thing that’d happen to Claire would be _her._  
  
“I didn't,” she says. “Patrick divorced me. It was about a year and a half ago now.”  
“You were staying at the academy that long before--?”  
“Hell no,” She sticks her empty coffee cup in the holder by her knee. “The only time I went back to that train wreck was when the old man died.”

  
“Where were you living, then?” Vanya asks, ignoring the obvious lead-in, though her hand tightens where it was rubbing her arm self-consciously.  
Allison answers, “With a couple I knew.” One of them had the annoying habit of peeling their face off every time they came back to the apartment and then leaving the limp skin-imprint laying around on the backs of chairs, and the other snored like a thunderstorm, but they’d taken Allison in. They’d gave her hot drinks, said Patrick was a dick who didn't deserve her, and taught her how to unravel the five locks on the front door. They were good friends. She should call them again, and she might, someday. “I'd been mostly concerned with taking care of Claire before,” Allison adds. “But. Patrick got custody, so I got a job at an office shuffling papers around.” The job had been good, mind-numbing, such a regular person thing to do. She'd been able to spend hours not thinking of anything.  
Vanya was nodding, her head moving up and down fluidly, but she’s looking at the hotel in front of them.  
It really was pretty, Allison thought. The pillars out in the front, made of actual marble or a very good substitute, a hundred or so windows glittering in the sun and not a single one smashed in. 

  
It would have been better if she'd let the conversation die there. She didn't, though, because curiousity was eating at a corner of her brain. Vanya had left the mansion when she was sixteen and never came back. “What about you?” Allison asks finally. 

“What about me?”

“Did you have anyone?” _Did,_ past-tense. Allison says it without even realizing, but it made sense. Her sister hadn't mentioned anyone else in all this time, had never needed to use the phone or asked to be driven to a specific part of the city (other than the first time for her clothes and then back to the Icarus for her wallet).  
“No,” Vanya says.  
“At all?” Allison frowns despite herself. It had been years, there must have been _someone_ in her sister's life.  
“No,” Vanya repeats herself. And then she kind of laughs, jagged and bitter. “No spouse, no boyfriend or girlfriend, no kids, no colleagues, no band. No brothers. No _sisters._ Nobody at all.”

Well.

Vanya had started it, Allison thinks. She presses, “So where were you living?”

Vanya roots around the center seat well for a couple seconds instead of answering, hiding her face with her arm and bent head. “Where did the smokes go?”  
Wordlessly, Allison passes her one of her cigarettes and her Zippo. 

Vanya takes it and then tries to light it, but it falls into her lap. Her hands are shaking too much to hold it and her fingers won’t close. The both of them look at the cherry for a minute where it's burning a hole into her thick skirt and coat.  
Vanya finally flicks it off of herself, brushing it with the back of her gloved hand. She unrolls her window anyway, taking deep and intentional breaths of the scrubbed-clean air.

  
“I lived in _Paris,_ for a while,” she says. “Almost four years. The old man had sent me there, sort of. He'd gave me a ticket, and when I left I figured I might as well use it. I was supposed to...” She trails off. “I could speak French okay, thanks to the mandatory classes I got while you were out saving the world. So I got a job at a cafe, just bussing tables, making coffee. Pretty grimy place but they didn't need any references. There's a lot of places in in the south end of the city like that. The people who came in were pretty rude a lot of the time, but it wasn't like I wasn't used to it. I stayed in a crappy motel for a month or two, saved up, and between that and-- and pawning my bass, I finally got enough money to afford some rent in an actual apartment.”     

“By yourself?”  
“No. Paris is expensive as fuck. There were three other people I roomed with—two bedrooms, so I got the couch. It was a roof, you know?”  
Allison nods, though she was pretty sure she _didn't_ know. She'd gone from the Academy to a one-bedroom apartment with huge windows all her own, which she’d paid for using her 'superhero stipend', as Pogo had referred to it.  (Mom had cried when she'd moved out, kissing her cheeks and wishing her good luck. They'd been sitting out in the sun for almost half an hour at the time, so her skin had smelled like bald tires and looked less human than usual. Allison had still hugged her back, pressing her nose against Mom's polyester hair.)  
“It was good,” Vanya continues, her voice dropping a bit. She pulls her sleeves up over her hands and stares at them like she'd never seen hands before. “My roommates were-- Alex and Paul and Pink, they were my friends. Some of the people at work were pretty friendly to me, too, but those three, they were… they were great. Pink, I'd never met anyone like her before. She was a second-gen chimp.”  
“There are chimps like that all over,” Allison says, looking over at her sister. Sentient chimps who’d had sentient children weren’t rare. Ms. Bernadine, the CEO in her old office, had been one.  
“None that I'd met before,” Vanya repeats herself.  “Anyway, she took me to see her folks a few times, and Alex and Paul did, too.”  
“They aren't really French names,” Allison says.  
Vanya shrugs. “Alex isn’t French, she just lived there. Pink changed her first name when she got legal. Paul was French though.” She pauses again, her mouth curling like she was in pain. “Ze was how I met them all, actually. Ze played in a underground band and I just bumped into zir a couple times after some shows. I was, uh, pretty drunk.”  
“That’s great.”  
“Yeah. Anyway, we were friends, and I didn't really tell them who I was. They knew the Academy, of course,” Vanya's voice gains a hard edge for a second. “But not me.”  
Allison doesn’t say anything.  
Vanya continues, “And then one night when I got drunk with them, we'd just go out and buy a couple six packs and some canned wine-- they were drunk too, right, like always, and somebody said something about parents. Maybe. I don't remember so clear. We, we did it all the time, but this time I just started spilling to them. Especially about Diego. This was a year, maybe, after I left. And, anyway. I went on a big rant, just a lot of like, gut-deep stuff.  We spent the weekend nursing hangovers, and then I had to work-- but a couple of days later they asked me if the stuff I had said and was true, and I said yeah. I thought they'd reject me or something, but. They said I should start writing a book.”

 

Right, the book. _Extra-Ordinary.  
_ Allison had heard of it. No one had known where she was when it’d been published, so it wasn't like reporters were knocking on her door about it, but she'd still made news. It was strange being 'famous' again, especially retroactively. She knows more or less what the book was about and what was in it. She would’ve, a couple of weeks ago, found it surprising that the only one out of all of them who'd been able to do whatever she wanted a lot of the time, not have to train every day or throw her life up as a price to some Greater Good, could still have hated her childhood as much as Allison herself had. Not now, though.

 

“Why did you leave?” She says, deciding to echo her sister's question from earlier.  
Vanya's expression tightens. “Pink got hit by a car,” she says. “She died.”  
"Oh. Shit."  
“Yeah. Her parents were distraught. Me and Alex and Paul were pretty freaked out. The guy who did it was an asshole but no one could afford to press charges, and even then, there was all this bullshit about how they should frame the case, if it was murder or reckless endangerment, if she was technically a citizen because she was a chimp and they weren't _sure._ Just a bunch of gross othering bullshit. After her funeral and everything we didn't want to get a new roommate just for rent, like, her room was _hers,_ you know? But at the same time we needed money, and we didn't have it. So.”  She goes quiet, sitting without saying anything for so long Allison wonders if she was going to keep going. Until she continues, her voice twisting strangely, “So I wrote here.”

“You sent a letter?”

“Email. There was an internet cafe up the block from my work.” Vanya shakes her head, like she was trying to drive the explanation away. “I asked to send me some of my allowance-- stipend, whatever. I needed it and I explained why.”  She flexes her wrists so that her hands were spread in front of her, their complete lack of natural vulnerability or blood vessels obvious in the sun coming through the window.  Ash floats from her skirt onto the top of her boot and the grimy, fossilized car carpet underneath them. “... I thought Pogo would read it, send something back. It was just part of two months rent. Until we could get back on our feet. It wouldn't have taken long.”

Allison can see where this is headed. “Hargreaves?”

Vanya nods, porcelain expression souring. “He saw it somehow. Said all sorts of bullshit, I don't even remember--” She claws the wetness out of the corner of her eye. (It smeared, chalky, on her hands.) “And the worst part is he still sent me something. A fucking plane ticket. Back here. And I couldn't trade it in, it was a fucking final sale, and I couldn't auction it off to some Americanphile kid because it was under my name and the airport would ask for ID. And I mean, I still had my own money, but it wasn't enough to make up the difference. Not on top of food and everything else.” She wipes her eyes again, her voice thickening. “It was the only thing I had asked for in-- in fucking _years_ , and still...”

 

Allison spends a couple minutes studying the outside of her window to try and give her sister some privacy.  
Vanya eventually laughs, bitter and tired. “So I got on the plane. I don't even know why-- or, or I didn't. Anyway. I told Al and Paul what was going on before then. Paul was pissed.” She pauses again.  
Allison wonders, for the first time since hearing about this whole sorry situation, if maybe her sister had been involved with Paul.  
“A lot,” Vanya continues. “I didn’t blame zir, it was a shitty few weeks. But Alex was cool about it. Cooler, anyway. She told me to keep writing and gave me a pack of smokes and a mini-vaporizer to stash on the plane. She sent me emails afterwards, for, for a while.” A small, fragile smile slips onto her face for a second or two, then evaporates. “I just packed up my shit and then left. I didn't really have much. A suitcase. And the fucking... my axe was gone, but I still brought the fucking violin with me.  
“I mean, it wasn't like I was coming back _here_ ,” Vanya continues. “I'd managed to change the destination on the ticket. I was _expected_ to go right home, of course. But the plane took me to Seattle. I had some money I'd saved up from my job and the stuff in my suitcase, and my violin, when I got out of the airport. And that was it. I had to build from the ground up. Again.”   
Vanya reaches for another cigarette and Allison lit it up for her. She half-expects the other woman to reject the help. Instead, Vanya nods distractedly, holding the smoke with both hands pressed together like she's praying. She looks out the window, where apparently there was a portal to her past that was invisible to anyone but her.

 

 _Wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that's happened in this family,_ Allison thinks.

 

Vanya sighs out billows of smoke. Despite the heat and her many layers of clothingshe doesn't seem to be sweating. “I kept writing the book,” she says. “Almost gave up on it, but I didn't have much else to do, you know? Plus.” She smiles her humourless smile again. “It was on my mind. Do you remember the homicidal monuments?”

  
“Yeah,” Allison says, almost surprised at herself. But she did. In Paris, they'd stopped the Eiffel tower from collapsing and killing people. It was one of the times when she'd still been young and unharmed enough to be happy about them having ice cream afterwards, when Hargreaves was relatively happy with the lot of them. Except Vanya. Now that she thought of it, that sort of thing had happened with the Space Needle, too.

  
Like she can read minds-- even though she can't, Allison would've known by now-- Vanya nods. “So I managed to land a crappy job, and between shifts I sat in my crappy apartment. And I thought about the Space Needle trying to kill people, and the Tower succeeding in it. And I just... wrote. It took a long time, maybe a year or too to finish all of it. It was like a terrible diary sometimes. My manager, the one who didn't ignore me, wanted to be a editor, so. He helped me edit it free of charge until it was readable to people other than me. That took another while... there's so much rewriting in writing, you wouldn’t believe--” Vanya coughs. “But it got better. Sent it off to some publishing place when it was done, and they accepted it. They said that they wanted me to do a press tour, starting there and ending up here, 'cause they said it'd get better ratings if it had the _triumph of the journey._ ” Vanya sprinkles the air with invisible sparkles. “Anyway. I hopped on. Practised my pubic speaking and read some of it in bookstores and libraries and stuff.” A small hint of pride colours her voice. “There were a lot of people, at a few of them.”  
  
'A lot' probably meant a dozen or so. Allison knows the type. They'd come up to her in the street every so often to try and “thank” her: grown people and beings who'd loved comic book's dashing heroes when they were small, even in the pandemonium and death that surrounded them in real life, even though heroes grow up and they should too. Alison hates those people. There'd always been such stupid _hope_ on their faces.

The pride dissipates, like smoke, from Vanya’s expression. “Anyway, money ran out by the end of the tour. I'd taken most of my clothes and stuff with me, thankfully, not that I had much, but other than that... I left the last bookstore after the reading like I was, fucking, nineteen again except without my axe.” She sticks her porcelain hand out the window into the hot sunlight, waving the rest of the story away with it. “A octonian from the bookstore took pity, used some of her money to mail some more of my stuff from Seattle to a public PO box here, I thanked her a billion times and called myself a cab. Found a hotel. You can picture the rest.”

  
“So you were here for... almost three years,” Allison says. That was a little surprising. “You never went to see anyone.”  
Vanya chokes on what might have been a laugh or a derisive snort. “No, I didn't. Did you?”  
Allison pauses, then shakes her head.

 

“Not even Space?” Vanya asks, turning her head to look at her.  
There’s something a little too pointed in her tone. Allison can feel her shoulders tensing up. She smooths them on purpose. “No.”  
“But the way you were following him,” Vanya says, “All over the city—you were together on the rooftop after the funeral--”  
“How’d you even hear about that? You didn’t show up,” Allison says sharply.  
“I can read the internet,” Vanya says. “There were reporters crawling all over that place, you know that.”  
She was right. Allison purses her mouth.  
“It’s just weird you wouldn’t talk to him,” Vanya presses, “For so long, and then hang all over him when you’re--”

“I was married,” Allison snaps. She chucks the cigarette that she was smoking out the window; an updraft caught it and nearly sent it back in her face. She flinches and pulls in her arm, rolling up the window against the heat and wind.   
“I only said talk,” Vanya says quietly. “Your husband didn’t let you talk to people?”  
“No, that’s--” This was a trap, she realizes. Whether Vanya had intended it to be when she asked about Claire or not, this _was_ a trap. Her hands tighten on the steering wheel. “Whatever. Space didn’t talk to me either, not—not once. He had all the time to talk to his family and he didn’t,” Allison says shortly.  
“You know, he could find you from wherever he is. On the moon or not.”  
Allison's hands tighten on the wheel, but she doesn't say anything.  
“Why are you still in the city? What are you waiting for?”

  
Someone’s walking up the pavement, fast, their security belt glinting in the sun. “Ma’am,” they call up towards the car, making Vanya turn in her seat towards the sound, “You can’t smoke in the--”  
Allison shifts the car into reverse with a slam. The hot tires squelch on the pavement as they roar backwards, jostling over a parking space barrier and then turning without a signal onto the road. She sticks her hand out of the part of the window that was open and flips off the nameless rent-a-cop who is already growing tinier behind them.

 

Allison keeps her hands tight on the wheel until they were about five minutes down the road.  
Vanya had grabbed onto the ‘Oh Jesus’ handle above her window when they’d peeled away from the hotel. She only lets it go because they stop at an intersection.

“What do you even want,” Allison says, picking up the conversation thread like a problem she couldn’t help but keep worrying at until the whole damn thing ended up unravelled. “Why would you ask me all of this--”   
“You kissed him,” Vanya accuses, fast. “On the rooftop. You were saying something and you leaned up to his ear and then all of a sudden the two of you kissed.” She swallows, then adds, “It was all over the news sites.”  
Allison needs a drink, and her gut heaves. A sudden surge of nausea for what Patrick must have thought seeing all of that, and then an equally sudden wave of anger over… she doesn’t even know, exactly, it was all tied together with Luther and the cameras and the fucking _ever-present_ celebrity that she’d grown up being, and—  “He was here for years but he couldn’t talk to his own family!” she snaps. “And then he just— he loved me. Okay? He was my whole world, we were--  _I_ was his _._ I— I made myself his. He loves me.”  
_I made him._

 

Vanya turns to Allison again, face twisted up, then stills as the full meaning washes over her. She sits back against the back of her seat. “… that’s really fucked up, Allison.”  
“Like hell.”  
“No, that isn’t even—” Vanya struggles. “You used—you changed someone so they’d benefit you. On purpose. That’s—how do you even know he wanted to kiss you? You can’t just do that to someone’s whole _life_ like that--”  
  
Her sister's judgment stings, so Allison stings right back. “You should've thought of that before you killed hundreds of people.”  
Vanya flinches _,_ immediately putting her hands up defensively. “I did _not._ That wasn't--”  
“It was you. It was your hands and your bullshit and your _music--_ ”  
“I—it wasn't my hands,” Vanya mutters. She pulls her long sleeves down over her hooked hands, and she stares unfocused at the floor. She continues like she’s not talking to Allison at all anymore, just someone yelling from insider her own head. “These aren't my _hands._ Or my _eyes--_  I can't fucking see right and anytime I look in the mirror they're so goddamned _blue,_ and--” She breaks off, pressing her palm to her mouth.

Spoken too much. Allison knows that feeling. She’s always had to choose her words carefully. The image of the gristle strings attached to Vanya’s throat appear in her head; she suppresses a nauseous shudder. 

What would the threads, her threads, look like, if other people could see them like Allison felt them?

  
“I'm getting sick of this.” Allison jerks the wheel a too hard and they swerve; the car behind them honks and the two water bottles (brief nods to the caffeine shakes they'd both had) slosh around violently in the cup holders.

“So leave,” Vanya snaps back, dropping her own hand. “I did. It's not so hard, once you do.”  
“Is this the part where we go on a cross-country joyride, then?” Allison snaps. “Just the girls of the messed up family that always wore masks so we never knew each other or some _bullshit_?”  
“At least then we’d have to fucking talk! I’ve been telling you all this and you haven’t said _anything_!” Vanya burst, finally answering the question Allison had asked days ago. “You just keep _lying_ and bullshitting and aggrandizing and—it’s not _fair._ You know everything about what happened to me, you haul me up out of the gurney like—like I was just a _puppet_ and don’t even tell me why!”

“You didn’t have to come with me,” Allison snaps; even as she says it something like primal terror wakes up in her chest, stretching its long feelers out and wrapping around her heart. It's getting harder for her to breathe.  
  
“You didn't have to take me with you,” Vanya snaps right back. Her fucked up blue eyes seem to get bluer as she gets angry, her hands shaking even more than usual. “I— I don’t even have to be in this car _now._ I can stay here,” she says, like it was a revelation, and she keeps steamrolling forwards. “I did fine on my own for _thirteen years,_ Allison, you can fucking drop me and I'll be fine, I don't need you either, I could just leave—”

 

“No, you can't.”

The words roll off her tongue before Allison can stop them, and she feels the web tighten around her throat and then snap in release before she could say anything to take it back.  
As soon as it does, two opposing things happen in her body: the tight ball of anxiety and fear that had curled up in her chest and made her heart beat harder relaxed, and her stomach curls over itself. She hadn't meant to do it. Not again. Oh, god.

 

In the seat beside her Vanya stiffens.  Her face hardens, blue eyes narrowing to slits. She looks, suddenly, more like the world-destroyer she'd been months ago then anyone Allison had known her to be before or since.  
  
  
Silence.

   
Absently, Allison wonders what exactly Vanya felt when Allison's powers took effect on her.  She can feel when her words did their work, but unless she could see it immediately, she was never sure _how_ they worked. It isn't like her sister was going to tell her now.  
Allison feels physically ill. She hadn’t meant to do it again, hadn’t meant to—to—    
Still, she can fix it. Allison knows she can fix it. She swallows, clearing her throat, and then clears her throat again, feeling the small threads wrap themselves tighter around her neck as she does.  
“You can just leave,” she says, and the threads give. Allison adds for good measure, “There's no reason why you couldn't or can't. There won't ever be. No matter what I say.” She doesn’t know if that will work, or not. She hopes so.

 _But you can stay, too,_ she adds in her head, very quietly _. If you want to stay. If we can stand each other that long._

 

Something in Vanya relaxes and her eyes lose their edge. _Worked.  
_ But she still doesn't say anything, just looks out her window at the spinning landscape.

 

Allison turns them back into the city, trying to ignore the pain in her head worsening.

 

  

*

 

  
Later, when they're both tired, sitting in separate sides of the room in the dark, Allison speaks up. Softly, trying to counterbalance the harshness of her words before. "I'm sorry."

Vanya's reply is quiet, too. "Doesn't matter."

  
And it really doesn't, in the grand scheme of things. This is not the worst thing that's happened to her sister. Not even the worst thing that Allison, personally, has done to her.

Still, the rejected forgiveness hurts. Allison says nothing, lies awake in the dark listening to her sister breathe.

 

//


End file.
